Saturday, January 23, 2010

There was no Growl display addon for media center. So I decided to get my hands a lil dirty and create one. I found some a source code from MCE 2005 that seemed to do exactly what I wanted. The only problem is that the source code didn't work for MCE 2005 rollup 2, and the link to the fix was long gone. So after some scouring, I found/posted the fix, recompiled the application DLL's, and began testing. It works great on my MCE 2005 boxes, and I even got it working in Windows 7 MCE, didn't test in Vista because vista sucks.

Why did I write this? Because I am an idiot who has a million other paid projects I should be writing but MCE keeps pulling me back in. And also, Notify Pro was released in Cydia which allows your iPhone to push growl notifications from your phone to a growl client, this works with that so new SMS/Incoming Calls alerts etc, work with media center. The alerts vanish after 7 seconds, no remote control needed.

To install the media center addon, exit media center, then copy all files from the MCE-Install directory into C:\Windows\ehome\ then double click the install.bat file. To uninstall run, uninstall.bat file. After this is done, MCE is ready to receive notifications. To send Growl notifications to the media center install growl http://www.growlforwindows.com and then install the scripty display: http://www.growlforwindows.com/displays/scripty

Now you need to configure scripty to launch our custom executable, so go to displays, set scripty as default, then hit browse and navigate to the MessageSender folder, and select the MessageSender.exe If scripty doesn't let you select the MessageSender.exe file then type *.* in the file name box and it should then allow it.

Now start a non maximized media center, and click preview and you should see this:

Now I guess you can install all kinds of growl apps and get your notifications in MCE.

I had no problems with this version of the messagesender yet (i´m using mediacenter of windows seven)

it just works great and yes i am using NotifyPro on the iPhonei googled for a growl mediacenter display and then i found your great way to show the iphone activities on the mediacenter and i´m really impressed :)

i also tested some other projects of you (Movie Browser and Bookmarkit)

great addon. Installing on Win 7 was easy and things worked immediately. Only one minor annoyance: German Umlauts don't work. They show up fine on my desktop (using any of the Growl for Windows standard displays) but not in media center.